Just read through this:

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

If you were responsible for the first message to a confirmed civilisation on an earth like planet:
1. What symbology would you use to portray your message?
And 2. What message would you send to represent earth?

I cleaned this topic from off-topic talk that slowly turned into drama.

Rest me to say that I am not pleased with the maturity of expression and level of critical thinking/research in the arguments in the thread as they were. So please think before you post and when you post make sure it is in a mature tone backed up with rational thinking.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

I have many comedic answers to these questions but I fear those in charge so I'll try to be sensible .

Its actually a really good question.
I say that because I cannot come up with an answer.

Would be tough,I'd imagine symbols could get dreadfully misunderstood. For all we know landing a rover would be like assasinating a world leader.

I'd start with strings of integers, possibly the primes, or the Fibonacci Sequence.

If they're advanced enough that they can develop civilization that we can communicate with, I imagine they must have at least some mathematical knowledge, and sending them number-theoretic information would be a good way to let them know that we are 1) intelligent and 2) that we have reached a certain level of intellectual advancement. I would say that, of all things, it's probably the most likely common language we'd have.

I think a good starting point would be to send, say, the first 100 primes, and see if they send us back the next ones. If we could get communication going in this way, alternately adding numbers to mathematically defined sequence, we've already managed to get communication, and cooperation, which would be a pretty great, as far as first contacts go.

After that, it all becomes more nebulous. Possibly more complicated sequences? By learning what kind of mathematics they do, we might be able to glean something about their psychology.

Blessings
~ND

Which format and what numeral system would you propose? Arabic numerals in UTF-8?



In case the ETs can read jpg and UTF-8, I'd send a pic of Kim Kardashian's ass with the message, that she's a powerful leader in the western hemisphere.

No, I'd try to keep it as simple as possible, symbolically speaking. You could just use sets of beeps. A signal could look like:

. . _ . . . _ . . . . . _ . . . . . . . _ . . . . . . . . . . . _ and so on and so forth.

If you're worried that the primes would get too big (which is a legitimate concern), a good compromise might be to use the Fibonacci Sequence modulo some n, which creates discrete, repeating periods. We could try to optimize n so that each number never got too big, but the period was long enough that it was obvious what it is.

Pi(n) when n = 5 would give us:

_ _ _ . _ . _ . . _ . . . _ _ _ . . . _ . . . _ . _ . . . . _ _ _ . . . . _ . . . . _ . . . _ . . _ _ _ . . _ . . _ . . . . _ .

It would then repeat. We could go longer: the peiord of Pi(5) is 20 digits, while Pi(10) is 60 digits, so on and so forth.

(In this case _ _ _ codes for the 0 integer - this requires that the gaps and the dots all take a standardized amount of time.)

The benefit of this is that, since it's a cyclic sequence, we could just put it on a loop, and play it until they hear it. The trade-off is that it's less obvious what it is, although I imagine that, given a sufficient level of advancement (and assuming sufficiently similar psychology), they'd probably get it). I can't think of anything else that an alien civilization would be more likely to recognize than a sequence of integers.

Blessings
~ND

Unicode of course.

More seriously, check the Voyager Golden Record:
https://en.wikipedia.org...ki/Voyager_Golden_Record

The record itself:


And some explanation:



Kind regards,

The Traveler

Also Yello had a nice track about this:






Kind regards,

The Traveler

I was never thrilled about how they gave out our home address in pulsars. The rest is all cool, but as a rule, I like to get to know someone before I invite them into my home. You know, on the off chance that they might try to murder me with a pickax. The last thing we need is to wake up one morning and find our skies full of pickax-wielding aliens checking their Pulsar Maps (TM) apps to make sure they got the right place.

Blessings
~ND

Numbers are interesting. But they're also an invention. Whst if the distant society had no concept of numbers at all?

It seems *extremely* unlikely to me that an alien species could develop a civilization that we could recognize and exchange information with that didn't have numbers. Any way we want to reliably communicate with aliens requires sending and receiving electromagnetic information on a specific frequency, and once you accept that, you kind of need some kind of basic concept of numbers. There really isn't any way for us to get information across light-year sized gulfs of space, unless you want to go completely old-fashioned like the voyager disk up there, and that's not nearly as efficient. If you buy into the whole 'DMT-entities-are-real-aliens' belief, you still have the problem of reliability and communicability (how often do you meet the same entities, and how often do other people meet the same group?)

It may be that this society has no concept of numbers, but (and I made this point above), numbers and mathematics are the thing that is *most likely* to be shared between us. It seems less likely that these aliens would be able to respond to music, or blueprints, or god forbid, language than they are to strings of beeps arranged in a particular pattern.

Blessings
~ND

NASA published the sound content of the Voyager Golden Record 2 days ago, if you or others are interested:

4th entry:
https://soundcloud.com/nasa
https://en.wikipedia.org...he_Voyager_Golden_Record

Also, let's not forget the Pioneer plaque:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque



If Dean Radin's research isn't flawed or fudged (hard to tell from the outside), there might be communication possible beyond electromagnetic or mechanical waves. Here he presents a study, where 'telepathic' communication takes place, electromagnetically shielded and recorded by an fMRI (@21:08 - but the whole talk is interesting if one has the time)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14640097

Yeah and the rover then becomes bacterium-prime, rescuing the peasants from the oppressive regime. We can teach them all about the wonders of Eukaryotes and complex life.

Hmm, I can't get the full text article, and have never heard of Radin, so I'll reserve judgement, but I have to say, I'm very, very, skeptical.

Even IF psi has been demonstrated in an MRI, we have no way of knowing whether the aliens have a nervous system that is enough like ours to receive and respond to our 'psi signals.' We also don't know how psi signals might propagate, how quickly they travel, or how precise we can get it (a few meters is one thing, tens of thousands of light years is another).

In contrast, if you can count above 2, you have integers.

Blessings
~ND

You're absolutely right, open-minded skepticism is the way.


Maybe their understanding of math is the same, but they just don't look in the sky with radio-telescopes since they only rely on "psi-communication"... And who says they have a nervous system based on proteins/carbon/DNA like us? It's not unthinkable.

How about if they find a near enough exact match for earth.
But there is no life what so ever their.
Would you start to question you evolutionary beliefs?

Reaching an intellectual point in which a subject becomes a belief should naturally progress into a new line of questioning.
I would question the ability of the team involved to predict an ideal planetary situation for life. But then, it's like having billions of flavours of ice-cream in front of you to choose from, each one costing billions of dollars to buy. And you've only experienced the taste of vanilla-earth.

Isn't Earth the ideal planetary situation for life?